Free Web Traffic Sources – 9 Proven Methods to Drive Website Traffic

 In my quest to bring my own costs down and also find “new” things to share with with my readers and “earn extra money” list subscribers, I recently revisited the wonderful world of finding free web traffic.

There are some great free things you can do out there, and many of them that I’ve been learning about myself lately center around the concept of blog promotion. While I’ve converted most of my own web sites to blog publishing platforms of one type or another, I’ve never really gotten into the learning about RSS feeds, content promotion through blog rings, pinging, and that sort of thing.

Now that I’ve started to implement it, I’m really fascinated by the possibilities and have added some blog feed based marketing methods to my list of things to always do. Speaking of which, if you don’t have a marketing playbook or checklist of things you do regularly, then I encourage you to adopt one.

9 Proven Methods to Drive Website Traffic

Content is, and always has been, the king the any media source. This includes television, newspaper, magazine, radio, Internet, and any other medium. The only reason that people tune in to a medium is for the content. With that in mind, you’ll notice that most of my basic, free marketing methods in my playbook revolve around providing content, and using that content to build my lists (the money is in the list!).

Without further ado, here is my marketing matrix of free methods:

1. Ads on free classified ads sites, such as Backpages, Craigslist, and Kijiji.

2. Posting articles on article directory sites, such as EzineArticles. Corrolary All articles are blog posts, and most blog posts are articles!

3. Creating educational YouTube videos and putting URL in the video and link in the description text.

4. Posting content to industry hubs and networking sites. For example, ActiveRain is a very popular blogging and online networking community for real estate brokers, in much the same way that Facebook is for college students. Networking with other people expands your sphere, also.

5. Discussion board participation. Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or “groups” on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

6. Comment on related blogs, leaving a link behind.

7. Automatically submit your content to aggregators.

8. Place links in your blog posts to allow readers to submit them to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Fark, and other such “best of blogging” sites.

And last, but definitely MOST important, the number one web traffic generator of all time

9. Build your list! Get people to subscribe to your email list or blog feed to receive announcements of blog updates, product promotions, tips, tricks, secrets, and anything else your readers might want to know about.

I recently became a huge fan of Feedburner.com, a Google product. It allows you to automate several functions listed above, as well as BUILD A LIST for FREE! You can add a “Get email updates” subscription form on your blog and they will be automatically notified whenever you put up a new post.

While lacking the significant power of a sequential autoresponder, it’s a great way to build a list without subscribing to a service. Feedburner will even let you export your subscriber list in Excel format, so you can take it with you if you move beyond it’s capabilities.

These 9 free marketing methods should get you thousands of unique visitors per month to your site, which is sufficient to generate a small but significant AdSense or affiliate revenue stream.